It is absolutely not recommended that you upgrade to SP2 on a system which is currently infected with malware or is otherwise unstable! You stand a very good chance of magnifying your current problems if you do so.

It is absolutely not recommended that you upgrade to SP2 on a system which is currently infected with malware or is otherwise unstable! You stand a very good chance of magnifying your current problems if you do so.

Yes. Sorry. I should have added that upgrading to SP2 should be done after removing the spyware... ejem... and that SP2 is an option but opens more vulnerabilities.... but whatever, we are talking about WinXP :D. I'll be careful in the future.

btw.... Some of the applications that I tried that failed to remove hotoffers:
Ad-aware (POS)
avast antivirus(did find and help though)
agv antivirus (kept seeing a trojan .dll, but it just kept coming back)
Microsoft Beta Antispyware (seems decent)
CWShredder (didnt see it at all v2.13)
Hijackthis (kept tabs on keys as applications removed them)